Building upon their critically acclaimed first volume, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon’s new Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965 is a recovery project of enormous proportions. Houck and Dixon have again combed church archives, government documents, university libraries, and private collections in pursuit of the civil rights movement’s long-buried eloquence. Their new work presents fifty new speeches and sermons delivered by both famed leaders and little-known civil rights activists on national stages and in quiet shacks. The speeches carry novel insights into the ways in which individuals and communities utilized religious rhetoric to upset the racial status quo in divided America during the civil rights era. Houck and Dixon’s work illustrates again how a movement so prominent in historical scholarship still has much to teach us.

"Unlike millions of other Americans and much of the national news media, Davis Houck and David Dixon recognize that the civil rights movement—the largest mass struggle for human rights in American history—did not hinge on a single person or a single speech. In this collection, they supply what the public has needed for years: a broad and diversified spectrum of orations that spurred the movement onward."

—Keith D. Miller, Professor of English, Arizona State University

“Davis Houck and David Dixon have brought to life voices of the past—some perhaps unknown or forgotten—whose witnesses were ‘Light shining in the Darkness.'"

—Clay F. Lee, Bishop, Retired, The United Methodist Church

Davis W. Houck (Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University) is Professor of Communication at Florida State University.

David E. Dixon (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame) is Professor and Chair of Political Science, California State University, Dominguez Hills.